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Women's History Review

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Women in late imperial China: a review of recent english-language

scholarship[1]
Paul S. Roppa
a
Clark University, USA

To cite this Article Ropp, Paul S.(1994) 'Women in late imperial China: a review of recent english-language scholarship[1]',
Women's History Review, 3: 3, 347 — 383
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 Women’s History Review, Volume 3, Number 3, 1994 WOMEN IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA

Women in Late Imperial China:

a review of recent English-language
scholarship[1]

PAUL S. ROPP
Clark University, USA

ABSTRACT This paper reviews recent developments in English-language

scholarship on Chinese women in late imperial times, roughly 1500-1800.

Topics discussed include: evolution of kinship patterns and marriage

institutions; women as commodities; widow chastity and suicide; women in

religion; women in historical and philosophical discourse; women in medical

and legal discourse; women in literary discourse; and women’s cultural

opportunities, literacy, and publication. The review highlights the rapid

expansion of this field since 1986, notes the richness of available sources on

the period, and suggests a research agenda for the future.

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Within the field of Chinese studies, many Western scholars have recently
turned their attention to women and to gender-related issues. Much of this
work is focused on the late imperial period (sometimes called the early
modern period), roughly from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth
century. From the sixteenth century onward, China began to experience
important indigenous social and economic changes, including rapid
economic expansion, monetization and commercialization of the economy,
population growth, urbanization, expansion of printing and literacy, and
increased social mobility. The best-documented period in Chinese history
before the nineteenth-century arrival of significant Western influences, the
late imperial period offers particularly rich sources for the study of Chinese
women.
Despite the relatively small size of Chinese studies in the West, there
has been too little communication in the China field between scholars of the
late imperial era and the modern and contemporary periods. Western
specialists in twentieth-century China easily accept the anti-traditional biases
of twentieth-century Chinese scholars (and/or the somewhat different but no
less real anti-traditional biases of our own society), and as a result they tend

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 PAUL S. ROPP

to condemn Confucianism and traditional society with caricatures that miss

much of the complexity and ambiguity of the past. As a result Chinese
women are too easily seen as passive victims of the traditional society, and
their participation in the system’s perpetuation is too easily dismissed as a
result of false consciousness and/or powerlessness. The work discussed
below goes far to undermine such simplistic views, but it has yet to exert a
strong influence on most studies of twentieth-century China.
In this essay, I introduce a sampling of recent English-language
scholarship on Chinese women in late imperial times. I confine my focus
primarily to works presented and/or published in the past five years, dealing
mainly with the period 1500-1800. I include some references to studies of
pre-sixteenth-century topics for comparative purposes. For convenience I
group these studies somewhat arbitrarily under the following topics:
evolution of kinship patterns and marriage institutions; women as
commodities; widow chastity and suicide; women in religion; women in
historical and philosophical discourse; women in medical and legal
discourse; women in literary discourse; and women’s cultural opportunities,
literacy, and publication.

Evolution of Kinship Patterns and Marriage Institutions

‘Women, marriage, and the family in Chinese history’, an introductory
survey by Patricia Ebrey, is a very succinct and useful summary of Western
scholarship on the history of Chinese women. Within a comparative context
Ebrey provides a brief history of patrilineal descent, the ethics of filial piety,
patriarchal values and property relations, marriage institutions, and
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ancestral rites and funerals in China from early times through the Song
period, 960-1279 (her own speciality). She discusses the Ming (1368-1644)
and Qing (1644-1911) periods more briefly, noting primarily the spread of
footbinding and widow chastity and suicide. Ebrey’s most important
contribution is to see the evolving patterns of family life and the status of
women in China not as mere functions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian
thought, but rather as resulting from the complex interplay of social,
political, legal, economic, and cultural forces.
By showing interrelationships between changes in social structure, in
marriage patterns, and in ancestral sacrificial rites over time, Ebrey is able to
relate the history of women to the social and political history of China’s
early imperial era (221 BC to the tenth century AD). In her view, the
complex interaction of élite and popular practices over hundreds of years
resulted in the gradual penetration of orthodox patrilineal ideology
throughout society at large by the late imperial period.
Noting that most textbook accounts report a decline in the status of
Chinese women around the eleventh century AD, Ebrey discusses the most
common practices associated with this decline: footbinding and widow

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 WOMEN IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA
chastity. In both cases she questions conventional explanations that tie these
two phenomena to the puritanism of Song-dynasty Neo-Confucianism.
Noting that widow remarriage was still very common in Song times, Ebrey
associates the increased emphasis on widow chastity and suicide in late
imperial times with changes in inheritance practices, social structure, and
new forms of competition for élite status.
Most originally, Ebrey relates the rise of footbinding around the twelfth
century to a redefinition of masculinity in the Song period (960-1279), away
from an active Tang (618-907) aristocratic ideal (which included hunting,
horse-back riding, polo, etc.) toward the more refined, artistic, sedentary, and
contemplative ideal of the Song literatus. Such a shift, Ebrey suggests, helps
explain the concurrent redefinition of femininity away from an active and
robust Tang ideal toward a more delicate, frail, dependent and secluded
feminine ideal of the late imperial period. Footbinding may thus have been
part of an effort to differentiate Chinese culture from “loose barbarian”
customs. (To this explanation I would only add that it may also have been
part of an effort to protect the sanctity of hierarchical gender relations in an
era of rapid social change.)
In conclusion, Ebrey emphasizes the important role of the Chinese
state in helping to standardize family practices across all regions, classes and
dialect groups by the late imperial period. In the West there was much
greater regional variation and change over time in inheritance practices,
percentage of people marrying, naming practices, and the incidence of
young couples starting marriages in their own homes. In China, state law
codes universally reinforced patriarchal principles; state control of élite
education insured the spread of Confucian ideology; and the state’s
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dispersion of officials far away from their native districts helped to exert a
strong unifying influence on Chinese family practices.
Ellen Soulliere’s doctoral dissertation, ‘Palace women in the Ming
Dynasty: 1368-1644’, is broader than her title might seem to imply. The first
half of the dissertation discusses instructions for women, particularly as
edited and published by the Ming court, often in conjunction with
succession crises (to bolster the legitimacy of particular claimants to the
throne). In comparing these Ming writings with earlier examples, Soulliere
notes the decline of the model “instructress” as a female ideal, and the
increasing emphasis instead on a woman’s moral integrity and chastity, and
the importance of her complete subordination to her husband and his
family. She attributes the decline of the moral instructress theme not to a
change in women’s status but rather to the decline of aristocratic society
and thus of an aristocratic ideal. At the same time, however, she describes a
progressive narrowing of acceptable female roles in instructional writings
from Han times (206 BC-220 AD) through the Ming. “In place of positive,
active values [in the Han élite], women were encouraged [by Ming times] to

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espouse passivity and self abnegation in a system in which, for them,

self-mutilation and suicide constituted the highest forms of heroism”(p. 71).
Soulliere provides a mixed picture of Ming imperially sponsored
instructional writings for women. She argues that Song Neo-Confucian
thought was not important in these writings, and that the last
imperially-sponsored work for women in the Ming, Lü Kun’s famous ‘Pattern
for women, illustrated and explained’, written in 1595, was clearly influenced
by the egalitarian critics of Song Neo-Confucianism (viz. the Taizhou
followers of Wang Yangming, 1472-1529) in developing a positive view of
women’s moral and intellectual capacities. At the same time, Soulliere notes
that Lü Kun approved a woman’s self-mutilation to preserve her chastity,
criticized the open mingling of the sexes in his own day, and urged the
complete subordination of a daughter-in-law to her husband’s family.[2]
In the remainder of the dissertation, Soulliere describes the lives and
roles of Ming palace women, from the lowly maid servants to the highest
imperial consorts, empresses, and empress dowagers. She notes the constant
succession of daily rituals that characterized palace life, describes in some
detail the recruitment and hierarchical organization of palace women, and
discusses the social and political implications of Ming imperial marriages.
Despite the opportunities for a dramatic rise in a family’s status if a
daughter became an empress or high-ranking consort, most families
apparently resisted palace recruitment, seeing the chances for a high-ranking
position as remote, and most palace service as little different from slavery or
indentured servitude. Describing the management of sexual relations in the
palace, Soulliere makes the intriguing observation that lesbian relationships
sometimes developed, and that even more often, close sexual and emotional
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attachments were made between palace women and eunuchs.

The most unique feature of Ming imperial marriages was the
stipulation laid down by the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang that all imperial
brides and consorts should come from low-ranking families. According to
Soulliere, this policy was scrupulously followed throughout the dynasty,
with the result that Ming palace women (and their families) were less
powerful than the imperial in-laws of any other dynasty. Her analysis is
consistent with the work of Jennifer Holmgren, John Chaffee and Evelyn
Rawski (in Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society, discussed below) in
seeing such a policy as a function of imperial politics rather than societal
trends regarding the status of women. Despite the relative weakness of Ming
imperial women, Soulliere notes that Empress Dowagers could in fact
authorize succession to the throne, and also pick the wives and consorts of
the reigning emperor. Making impressive use of a limited range of available
sources (which are often idealized and stereotyped), Soulliere has written an
illuminating study.
The anthology, Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society, addresses
the ways that marriage functioned over time to mediate three types of

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inequalities in Chinese society: “the political power of rulers, social and
economic differences among families, and inequalities between men and
women and among women” (p. 2). In her Introduction, Patricia Ebrey briefly
describes the work of Jack Goody on marriage and the family in Africa and
Eurasia, and notes its importance in giving Chinese historians new ways to
conceptualize the study of kinship and gender issues.[3] In particular,
Goody’s analysis highlights the importance of dowry-based marriage as an
economic transaction in which property exchanges help to re-enforce class
inequalities. Ebrey notes that Goody’s “dowry complex” does not entirely fit
the Chinese case, because in many instances in China dowries were no
larger than betrothal gifts, and Goody’s analysis puts little emphasis on the
kind of ritual and status display in marriage that played such an important
role in Chinese marriage institutions.
Of the ten essays in this volume, four deal with pre-Ming topics, four
with the twentieth century, and two with the Qing period.[4] In ‘Ch’ing
imperial marriage and problems of rulership’,[5] Evelyn S. Rawski describes
imperial marriages in the Qing period, and notes several distinctive traits of
the Qing system. Confining marriage primarily to Manchu and Han banner
(i.e. military) families, Qing emperors limited the potential powers of
imperial wives and mothers by their succession system in which the heir to
the throne was chosen only on the death of an emperor, and irrespective of
the rank of his mother. Tracing the evolution of imperial marriages over the
course of the dynasty, Rawski shows that in stark contrast with the kinship
system of commoners, only one Qing emperor was the son of an emperor’s
first wife (or Empress). However, the Qing court embraced such Confucian
values as filial piety which meant that even an all-powerful emperor owed
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deep filial love and respect to his mother. Thus, despite safeguards against
the power of palace women, Empress Dowagers could exert a great deal of
power. The most notorious example was of course the Empress Dowager
Cixi who, in alliance with several imperial agnates, managed to manipulate
the succession of several infant emperors in the late nineteenth century,
allowing her to dominate the court for nearly the last fifty years of the
dynasty.
The second essay on the Qing period in Marriage and Inequality is
‘Grooming a daughter for marriage: brides and wives in the mid-Ch’ing
period’, in which Susan Mann discusses literati discourse on marriage, on
women’s education, and on rules of conduct for women. She highlights the
spread of dowry practices in the Qing even to families of little means (in
contrast to the Song when dowry was primarily an upper class
phenomenon), and notes the concern of many literati writers to reassert
status distinctions and ‘proper’ boundaries between men and women,
between wives and concubines, and between élite and commoner families. In
examining the mid-Qing classical revival and its impact on views of women’s
proper roles, Mann detects a connection between élite status anxieties on

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 PAUL S. ROPP

the one hand, and anxieties over the sanctity of gender hierarchies on the
other.

Concern about boundary crossing in the domestic realm, I would

suggest, was a metaphor for concern about boundaries in the society as a

whole. Within the scholar class, female literacy was breaking down the

walls that separated the sexes and kept women pure from the

contaminating influences of the outside world. In the society at large,

mobility was eroding occupational and class barriers that had once

served to segregate marriage markets. Though women were the focus of

much of the anxiety that attended these changes, in the discourse we

have examined, women became a vehicle for expressing concerns about

status shared by all men of the scholar class. (p. 221)

While Mann’s point is somewhat speculative, it strikes me as very perceptive

in relating the mid-Qing literati discourse on women to the larger social
trends of the time. Mann concludes her essay by citing the parallels between
mid-Qing China and Renaissance Venice: in both eras of rapid social change,
“women were named the guardians of morality and stability, charged with
protecting the sanctuary of the family” (p. 222).
The four essays on the twentieth century in Marriage and Inequality

deal with women, property and marriage issues among commoners and
lower class groups. Rubie Watson’s ‘Wives, concubines and maids: servitude
and kinship in the Hong Kong Region, 1900-1940’, touches on, and helps
illuminate, commoner marriages in the late Qing.[6] Watson analyzes the
sharp social stratification of women – as mui-jai (maids or indentured
servants), concubines, and wives – at the village level in early
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twentieth-century south China. Whereas wives came to a family with a dowry

they could control and the status of a proper wife, concubines came to a
family by purchase, with no ritual display, no property of their own, and no
chance for future contact with their natal family. Mui-jai were sold into
service as young girls, to serve the women of a family as maids, usually until
marriage age of 17 or 18. Watson’s essay is a vivid reminder of the sharp
social stratification of Chinese society at all levels.
In her concluding ‘Afterword: marriage and gender inequality’, Rubie
Watson emphasizes the importance of marriage rites and of patrilocal
residence (brides moving to husband’s parental household) in reinforcing
gender inequalities. Reviewing many of the book’s themes regarding
property, marriage, and change over time, Watson suggests that changes in
marriage and the growth of lineage building in the late imperial era may
best be understood as status- and wealth-building strategies suitable to an
era when hereditary privilege no longer survived. She concludes by noting
the preliminary nature of the present research, and the many opportunities
for both historians and anthropologists for further work in the study of
gender and inequality in the China field. The volume as a whole is of a very

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high quality, filled with useful cross-references and intriguing comparative
suggestions.
Another of Watson’s articles, ‘The named and the nameless: gender
and person in Chinese society’, is an anthropological study based on
contemporary field work but with important implications for our
understanding of marriage among commoners in the late imperial period.
Noting the importance of names in Chinese society for the formation of
horoscopes and the listing of ancestors in lineage and community rituals,
Watson reports that girls in the New Territories village of Ha Tsuen were
not registered with the government before the 1960s, and were not
generally given written names at all. At marriage a woman became known to
others only through a series of kinship terms (wife, daughter-in-law,
sister-in-law, mother, etc.), in effect giving her an identity only in relation to
others, and particularly in relation to the males of the family. Every one of
these terms enmeshes her in hierarchies based on age, gender and
generation. Even in death, Watson reports, a woman has no personal name;
she is identified only by her father’s surname, and appended only to her
husband’s ancestral tablet. Thus in non-élite peasant society, Watson
concludes, “women by definition cannot hold positions of authority” (p.
628). This kind of study serves as a useful reminder to those of us who write
on élite society that perhaps few generalizations can be made for all social
classes in Chinese society.[7]

Women as Commodities
Gail Hershatter’s essay in Marriage and Inequality, ‘Prostitution and the
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market in women in early twentieth-century Shanghai’, documents the

growth of prostitution in twentieth-century Shanghai, the regionalism that
permeated the business, the complex hierarchy of different types and classes
of prostitutes, and the ways people entered and exited the profession. The
essay deals primarily with the Republican period, but it describes trends that
began at least as early as the mid-nineteenth century. While showing the
extremes to which the commodification of women reached in prostitution,
Hershatter concludes with a thoughtful caution against regarding prostitutes
simply as commodities or slaves. Many entered prostitution only temporarily,
maintained contact with their natal families, and/or entered into contractual
relations or developed fictive kinship ties with their madam. If they were
commodities, they were usually not without some recourse and some control
over their working environment.
In a Marxist-inspired economic analysis, ‘The commoditization of
Chinese women’, Hill Gates argues that Chinese women from the tenth to
the nineteenth century were increasingly treated

like commodities not only in the suddenly expanded impersonal labor

market, where men were treated similarly, but within the sphere of

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 PAUL S. ROPP

kinship as well. Men could, and frequently did, exchange their female kin

for money, whether in marriage, adoption, or sale into slavery or

prostitution. As objects for exchange, women could not be actors in

exchanges. Such an illusion of passivity screened women – in men’s eyes

and perhaps in their own – from public view. Women simultaneously

became culturally invisible and absolutely essential in a rapidly changing

economic system based, with the collusion of a powerful state, on the

patriarchal family. (p. 799)

Gates draws on English-language economic history, and on Chinese Marxist

studies of “the sprouts of capitalism”, to argue that “the tributary mode of
production” (the traditional agrarian economy) was increasingly challenged
and influenced by a “petty capitalist mode of production” (intensified
commercialization and monetization, and the development of commodity
farming) over the last thousand years of China’s imperial history.
In the increasingly competitive market economy of late imperial times
Gates sees women primarily as victims, exploited as bearers of sons, as
unpaid laborers in commodity production, and as the alienable property of
patricorporations, to be used as “a sort of ballast for the balancing act
between capital and labor that each household tried to maintain” (p. 815).
Gates portrays late imperial society as one in which women were commonly
killed as infants; sold into slavery, prostitution or indentured servitude; put
up for adoption; or (if they were fortunate) married for the highest
brideprice. Women, in her view were caught in a kind of double
victimization: first victimized by exploitation in the petty capitalist mode of
production, and even more viciously demeaned in the Song Neo-Confucian
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counterattack (representing the interests of the tributary mode of

production) which responded to social change and fluidity by reasserting the
claims of Confucian patriarchy and systematically dispossessing women of
powers, rights, and resources. In this view, footbinding may be seen as a way
of saving women from the risks of “moral contamination” brought on by
their economic independence and physical mobility.
The main difficulty with Gates’s analysis is its unqualified and sweeping
characterization of one thousand years as wholly without any redeeming
features in so far as women are concerned. She has written a stimulating
and imaginative theoretical analysis, especially useful in highlighting
women’s often-overlooked role in the late imperial Chinese economy.[8]
However, compared to such historical studies as Ebrey’s, which argues that
many causal factors influenced the treatment and status of women, Gates’s
analysis is economically reductive and overly negative in emphasizing the
plight of women as passive victims. It is not clear, for example, how Gates’s
framework could account for such Ming-Qing trends as the rise of female
literacy, the increased publication of women’s writings, the establishment of
charitable estates for the support of widows, the increased incidence of

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companionate marriages in urban areas, and the expanding market for
romantic literature aimed especially at women readers.
In contrast to Gates’s somewhat abstract discussion of the
commodification of women, Maria Jaschok’s anthropological study of mui-jai
in early twentieth-century Hong Kong, Concubines and Bondservants: the
social history of a Chinese custom, hits the reader with a personal force
that is almost overwhelming. Although dealing specifically with
twentieth-century developments, Jaschok describes a system of selling young
girls that clearly dates back to earlier times. In several case studies, Jaschok
vividly describes the histories of several mui-jai who are sold into servitude,
first to brokers who “fatten” or train them for resale (at a large profit) to
wealthy customers. Jaschok documents the brutality of this system, and its
dehumanizing effects, noting, for example, how such girls often learn only
two things from their experience: money and its power over people; and a
corollary, sex and its power over men. She traces the life histories of several
mui-jai who become favored concubines and who literally “turn families
upside down” by usurping the position of the wife and even claiming the
family’s inheritance. While mui-jai status was legally outlawed in 1923, the
custom survived long beyond that date, and its effects are still being played
out as daughters and granddaughters of former mui-jai still have to deal
with its scars.
In all this Jaschok shows Chinese women not only as victims but as
victimizers as well (and in many cases as stronger than the males who
ostensibly wield power over them). She also tells vivid tales of families
whose men are such weak addicts of sex, drugs, alcohol and gambling that
they sell every woman in their family – wives, daughters and
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daughters-in-law alike. In describing enormous brutality toward women,

Jaschok seems to confirm the analysis of Hill Gates, but she attributes part
of the brutality she describes to the moral breakdown of treaty port society;
and she does not claim to characterize all of Chinese society with the
concrete and compelling stories she tells.

Widow Chastity and Suicide in the Ming and Qing

As noted above, the dramatic rise in the incidence and commemoration of
widow chastity and suicide in the Ming and Qing periods has often been
cited in the twentieth century as evidence of women’s declining status in
late imperial times.[9] As will become clear below, recent scholarship has
moved increasingly away from the framework of asking whether ‘women’s
status’ was rising or falling, and has begun instead to analyze the
ambiguities and subtleties of the many ways that gender worked in Ming
and Qing society. Recent scholarship has also begun to move away from
‘victimization’ studies, and to emphasize instead that Chinese women’s lives
have been shaped by many factors, including their own active choices and

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 PAUL S. ROPP

participation in social, economic, and family life. Finally, many scholars have
begun to question the assumption that dominated early twentieth-century
analyses (and that still dominates some work in the People’s Republic of
China), namely that the suffering of women in Chinese society was primarily
a function of conservative patriarchal Neo-Confucianism.
In ‘Widows in the kinship, class, and community structures of Qing
Dynasty China’, Susan Mann explores three facets of widowhood in the Qing
period: élite discourse on chastity, the impact of mother-son ties in the
commemoration of widow chastity, and class differences in widow chastity.
Mann pays particular attention to the Qing county gazetteer writers and
their fascination with widow chastity. She notes that in such gazetteers,
“female chastity was a metaphor for community honor” (p. 43). Indeed,
competition for government-sponsored rewards for the families of chaste
widows became so intense that the government had to draw up detailed
regulations for the investigation and verification of families’ claims. Drawing
on Margery Wolf’s notion of the “uterine family” (in which a woman’s
closest emotional ties are with her children, and especially her sons on
whom her security ultimately depends),[10] Mann notes that many gazetteer
writers were men of modest backgrounds who were in many cases first
taught to read by their mothers. These men were deeply moved by tales of
widow self-sacrifice on behalf of sons and families. “Seizing on women as
models of human conduct, they attributed to these women a consciousness,
an intentionality, that expressed their own values” (p. 44).
As Mann rightly notes, a widow in the Qing period was vulnerable in
many ways: to gossip, to sexual innuendo or attack, to forced remarriage or
even sale, or to expulsion without any means of support. In such an
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atmosphere, the chaste widow ideal was not necessarily misogynist for it
could offer protection against undesirable remarriage and/or sexual abuse.
Finally, Mann introduces an important class distinction into her argument.
She notes that the Manchu emperors promoted female chastity in part to
bolster their image as defenders of a moral Chinese past; and she suggests
that the prestige of the chaste widow ideal led many commoners and lower
gentry to encourage and publicize the practice of chaste widowhood in
order to bolster their own status. Ironically, as chaste widowhood became
increasingly common in all classes, it may have lost something as a status
symbol. Mann suggests in conclusion that the widow chastity ideal in the
Qing may have been a case of “lagging emulation” (a term coined by
Ernestine Friedl), “a belated effort by a lower-class group to emulate norms
even as they are being abandoned by their superiors” (p. 51). Mann’s finely
nuanced article skillfully suggests the complexity of the issues involved in
the concept and practice of chaste widowhood.
By far the most detailed English-language study of Ming-Qing widow
chastity and suicide is that of T’ien Ju-k’ang (in pinyin, Tian Rukang), Male
Anxiety and Female Chastity: a comparative study of Chinese ethical

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 WOMEN IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA
values in Ming-Ch’ing times. T’ien sets out to document and explain the
rising incidence and commemoration of widow chastity and suicide in the
Ming and Qing dynasties. Based on 166 local Ming gazetteers and a
sampling of Qing gazetteers, T’ien’s study certainly succeeds in documenting
the dramatic increase in widow suicide in the Ming and Qing. He also
catalogues the most common forms of suicide (public hanging and private
fasting), calculates the ratio of suicides to lifelong widows (1:3 in the Ming
and 1:20 in the Qing), and notes the very small proportion of all widow
suicides that were committed by “betrothed widows” (whose fiancés died
before consummation of the marriage). He describes the gradually
expanding Ming efforts to reward widow chastity and suicide, and notes the
prestige such rewards brought to families and districts.
T’ien argues that economic factors were more important than
Neo-Confucian moralism in the growing popularity of widow suicide. Most
importantly, he suggests that the prevalence of female infanticide created a
shortage of women and thereby increased pressures on widows to remarry.
He also duly emphasizes the Ming stipulations regarding remarried widows’
forfeiture of their dowry and their husband’s property, and notes the
incentive created thereby for families to pressure widows to remarry. He
could strengthen his argument here, in my view, by putting more emphasis
on the ways these pressures to remarry could stimulate suicides as a form of
resistance.
In T’ien’s most ambitious and least convincing chapter, he attempts to
account for causal factors in widow suicide by examining regional
differences in (recorded) suicide rates and trying to find meaningful
correlation’s between those suicide rates and other quantifiable variables.
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Examining three prefectures with high suicide rates (Huizhou in Anhui, and
Quanzhou and Zhangzhou in Fujian), T’ien considers the following
characteristics as potentially significant: dense population; prevalence of
infanticide; high level of commercial development; reputation for thrift and
stinginess; reputation for jealous wives; and a high proportion of civil service
examination candidates and degree holders. Among all these factors, T’ien
finds only the last to be significantly linked to widow suicide. The other
factors are either too universal to account for regional variation (e.g. dense
population and prevalence of infanticide), too difficult to measure (e.g.
jealous wives), or contradicted by similar areas with low suicide rates (e.g.
other commercially developed areas). One obvious reason for the high
correlation of examination success and recorded widow suicide is that
higher literacy rates produce more recorders and readers of chaste widow
biographies. T’ien argues, however, that the encouragement of female virtue
and widow suicide provided frustrated scholars with a “vicarious morality”
and an outlet for their pent up frustrations and anxieties. (How and why
literati praise was enough to induce women to kill themselves is not made
clear.)

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In a chapter without statistics (or even much anecdotal evidence), T’ien

discusses the “emotional vulnerability of women”, and argues that the
decline of orthodox Buddhism removed an important constraint against
suicide. Simultaneously, according to T’ien, a rise in popular beliefs in
ghosts and spirits in Ming times gave women an increasing sense that
suicide would not land them in hell but would rather offer an opportunity
for revenge against those who made their lives unbearable. (How this kind
of argument meshes with male anxiety and the Confucian rationale for
suicide is not clear.) In his final chapter, T’ien documents the increasing
intensification of the cult of widow chastity in Qing times. He concludes that
the major causal factors in this cult were male anxiety engendered by the
severity of examination competition, and the “preponderance of
superstitious, idolatrous beliefs derived from Buddhism” (p. 147).[11]
T’ien Ju-k’ang has made an important contribution in painstakingly
compiling a great deal of quantitative information on the incidence and
commemoration of widow suicide in the Ming and Qing. However, his
central thesis is not convincing. He acknowledges on occasion that the
compilers of local gazetteers had a variety of motivations very different from
that of a modern social scientist, but unlike Susan Mann, he seldom appears
to take these differences into account in his analysis. And in defining male
anxiety so narrowly, he misses a golden opportunity to discuss possible
larger connections between the unsettling effects of rapid social and
economic change, literati anxiety over status in general and gender
boundaries and hierarchies in particular, the development of Neo-Confucian
attitudes toward women, and the spreading cult of widow chastity.
A very different view of widow chastity emerges from a study by Jerry
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Dennerline, ‘Marriage, adoption, and charity in the development of lineages

in Wu-hsi from Sung to Ch’ing’. Dennerline emphasizes the importance of
intermarriage strategies among several local élite lineages in Wuxi (near
Suzhou), and suggests that charitable estates for the support of widows and
orphans were crucial to these families in making desirable marriage
alliances. These estates, often established at the insistence of women
themselves, assured a bride’s family that their daughter would never be cast
adrift, forcibly remarried, or pressured into suicide, by the untimely death of
her husband.
Several important implications flow from Dennerline’s analysis: (1) that
widow chastity was a powerful and tangible symbol of élite status; (2) that by
contrast suicide might well be seen as a disgrace and a loss of face for an
élite family; (3) that women had considerable influence in controlling family
property, in shaping long-term family strategies, and in maintaining family
oral and ritual traditions. As James Watson notes in the ‘Anthropological
overview’ that concludes Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China,
Dennerline in effect challenges the views of many anthropologists who
assume that Chinese women had no control of family property and were

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generally “passive reactors who lived in the shadows of an androcentric
world”.[12]

Women in Religion
Two recent studies of Ming-Qing sectarian religion suggest that the status of
women was considerably higher in popular Buddhism and Taoism than in
the Neo-Confucian tradition. Ann Waltner, in ‘T’an-yang-tzu and Wang
Shih-chen: visionary and bureaucrat in the late Ming’, argues that gender
was no barrier to sainthood in late Ming popular religion, and that women
enjoyed more freedom of action and belief in popular Ming religion than in
any other sphere of life. As a young visionary caught up in her religious
quest, Tanyangzi did not want to marry despite an engagement arranged by
her parents. She knew of her fiance’s premature death before being told,
and seized on the opportunity by vowing to remain forever a chaste widow.
After extensive fasting and following an arduous spiritual regimen, she soon
died, and quickly came to be worshipped as an immortal. Although co-opted
and canonized by Confucians as a conventional chaste widow, Tanyangzi
was also highly praised in lavish terms as a religious saint by no less a
person than Wang Shizhen (1526-90), a prominent official and one of the
most influential literary figures of his generation. Tanyangzi was in fact a
powerful mediator between the human and divine worlds. Waltner cites her
life, and Wang Shizhen’s lavish praise of her, to illustrate the influence of
late Ming popular religion in undermining Confucian hierarchies (including
gender hierarchies) of authority and power.
In ‘Values in sectarian literature’, a study of Ming-Qing popular
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Buddhist scriptures, or baojuan, Daniel Overmyer describes a particularly

strong egalitarian and utopian strain in Buddhism which featured strong
appeals to women. He finds few gender distinctions in these texts, and he
notes that women were often involved in reciting and passing on baojuan
scriptures, some of which were aimed specifically at a female audience.
Among the appeals to women in these texts were arguments against the
burdens of marriage, child-bearing, and submission to husbands. The
popular Buddhist pantheon included heroines who disobeyed their parents,
refused to marry, and put the quest for religious salvation far above
Confucian notions of familial duty. Overmyer’s and Waltner’s studies
together suggest a late Ming blurring of hierarchical lines that may help to
account for the Qing-period élite male anxiety about class and gender cited
by Susan Mann and Charlotte Furth (discussed below).
Overmyer has also written ‘Women in Chinese religions: submission,
struggle, transcendence’, a very broad survey of women’s participation in
Chinese religion from earliest recorded history to the recent past. While
noting that Chinese religions in general were socially conservative,
Overmyer argues that in the last thousand years, women in China have

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participated in religious movements in a wide variety of ways, as co-leaders

of religious Daoism (with their husbands), as Daoist immortals or saints, as
Chan Buddhist masters, as Buddhist nuns; and women have long been the
main supporters of popular religion in China, serving as “performers of
household rituals, worshippers at village temples, participants in
pilgrimages, and spirit-mediums” (p. 106). Overmyer’s broad survey suggests
that the religious roles of Chinese women have not been adequately
recognized, to the detriment of our clear understanding, both of Chinese
religions and of gender relations in Chinese society.

Women in Historical and Philosophical Discourse

Susan Mann examines an influential conservative view of women’s education
in her essay, “‘Fuxue’ (women’s learning) by Zhang Xuecheng (1738-1801):
China’s first history of women’s culture”. Zhang Xuecheng, a prominent
historian and philosopher of history, wrote his historical survey of women’s
learning primarily as an attack on the poet Yuan Mei (1716-98) who took
women disciples, taught them to write romantic poetry, and helped them to
publish such works under their own names. Women, in Zhang’s view, were
the equal of men in intelligence and ability, but he believed they should
study the Confucian classics, and not poetry which only encouraged
sensuality, promiscuity, and worse. By the eighteenth century, Zhang
argued, women might even be in a position to restore genuine classical
scholarship because they could do so without falling victim to the
corruptions of fame and power that accompanied the competition of males
in the examination system. Mann shows that Zhang was perceptive in seeing
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Yuan Mei’s tendency to exploit women for the entertainment and titillation
of men, yet she also shows the ultimate contradiction in Zhang’s views, for
in believing in the necessary silence of women on all matters public and
political, he would have allowed them no ‘voice’ with which to express their
classical ideals.
Charlotte Furth’s essay, ‘The patriarch’s legacy: household instructions
and the transmission of orthodox values’, is an illuminating study of
household instructions from the Ming-Qing period. “The first place where
the guardians of orthodoxy felt themselves vulnerable”, she writes, “was
concerning the role of women” (p. 386). Furth thus finds household
instructions filled with warnings and admonitions against conjugal intimacy
(about which more below), the potential divisiveness of wives, the necessity
of female seclusion, and the susceptibility of women to religious heterodoxy.
She also acknowledges the existence of an urban-based bohemian subculture
typified by a few alienated poets, novelists and other aesthetes who ridiculed
and/or violated these orthodox teachings. In Furth’s view, however, this
challenge to orthodoxy was a relatively weak one with no independent base
of socio-economic support.

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In an analysis of Ming funerary writings, ‘Gender ideals in Ming
epitaph literature’, Katherine Carlitz has found male ambivalence toward
female literacy (with some men arguing that literacy is not necessary for the
proper performance of a woman’s duties), but also strong evidence that
companionate marriages became increasingly common among gentry
families in the Ming period. Carlitz cites several cases where men praise
strong conjugal ties of affection, and mourn their wives far more intensely
than they do their parents.
Carlitz argues in a strikingly original study, ‘Writing for women and
writing for oneself: Lü Kun’s Gui fan and Shen yin yu’ that Lü Kun’s
influential late Ming writings on women have far more to do with rapid
social and economic change than with women’s issues per se. Carlitz
believes the late Ming proliferation of lavish collections of women’s
biographies reflects: (1) the rising prosperity and rising female literacy of the
period which helped create a market for such books, and (2) élite anxieties
caused by the increasingly money-driven economy, the blurring of social
hierarchies, and the growing popularity of sectarian religion. As a result,
such a writer as Lü Kun condemned the rise of conspicuous consumption
even though his expensive morality books reflected and depended on that
phenomenon.
In ‘The social uses of female virtue in late Ming editions of Lienü
zhuan’, Carlitz describes in more detail the expanding publishing industry,
and the proliferation of lavishly illustrated collections of virtuous women’s
biographies (lienü zhuan) in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. She suggests that the growing sophistication and technical skills
of book illustrators (who also produced expensive illustrated versions of
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drama and fiction) helped produce increasingly beautiful and delicate

illustrations, in effect sentimentalizing the portrayal of female virtue.
Contrasting late Ming lienü zhuan with earlier editions, Carlitz finds in the
Ming a greater emphasis on wifely fidelity to husbands, and less emphasis on
active and practical women who give advice to emperors and officials.
Examining eleven different late Ming lienu zhuan, Carlitz notes the variety
of purposes evident in these publications: Lü Kun, for example, was a stern
moralizer out to reform what he saw as lax morals among Ming women;
some commercial publishers, interested primarily in monetary gain,
presented dramatic biographies of virtuous women as forms of
entertainment; some private families, especially in Huizhou (Anhui province),
solicited contributions to sponsor the private publications of virtuous
women’s biographies aimed at the glorification of their particular area
and/or lineage. In both of the above essays Carlitz illustrates how a
sensitivity to the social context of intellectual trends helps to illuminate
those trends, and in the process she reveals some of the complexities of
social and cultural interaction in the late Ming.

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Women in Medical and Legal Discourse

Charlotte Furth explores the interaction of social and sexual factors in the
construction of gender in late Ming times in ‘Androgynous males and
deficient females: biology and gender boundaries in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century China’. Gleaning medical and literary sources for
reports of such biological anomalies as hermaphrodites, “natural eunuchs”,
“stone maidens” (whose hymens were impenetrable), males who became
females, and females who became males, Furth explores the ambiguities and
complexities of gender identification for both males and females. She
speculates that the high incidence of reports of anomalous cases in the late
Ming might have resulted from anxieties over the growing practice of
homosexuality among males of the Ming élite, and the growing number and
power of eunuchs in the Ming court. While Chinese assumptions of yin-yang

complementarity provided a flexible framework to account for such

anomalies, Furth observes that

bodily ambiguity was translated into social gender according to patterns

that identified the female with sexual deficiency and the male with

androgynous erotic capabilities ... Where individuals were socially

powerful and/or had capacity to act upon the world, their sexual organs

and sexual acts could be genderized as male. Female gender, on the

other hand, was identified with those powerless persons whose bodies

were read as defective and whose sexuality was passive or absent.

(pp. 23-24)
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Furth has also written two other path-breaking articles that reveal both
positive and negative attitudes toward women in Qing-dynasty medical
traditions. In ‘Blood, body and gender: medical images of the female
condition in China, 1600-1850’, she describes popular images of female
weakness and emotionality as well as more positive appreciations of female
generativity. Reproduction was seen as depleting, and women were seen as
dangerously prone to anger which could trigger a variety of physical and
psychological disorders. Yet, in this medical literature Furth finds a
relatively positive view of female sexuality at odds with the pornographic
and Daoist bedchamber traditions in which women through sexual combat
rob men of their vital essence. In ‘Concepts of pregnancy, childbirth, and
infancy in Ch’ing Dynasty China’, she suggests that the medical traditions
regarding pregnancy tended to refute some popular superstitions about
menstrual blood, to emphasize the dangers of loss of blood in birth rather
than the polluting power of menstruation, and to assign women positive
roles in healing and life-giving processes. In all these ways the medical
traditions “softened Confucian misogyny” (p. 29). Negatively the medical
traditions sanctioned male control over women, held women fundamentally

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responsible for the health and survival of their children, and in effect defined
womanhood as the bearing and raising of healthy children.
In ‘Ideology and sexuality: rape laws in Qing China’, Vivien Ng finds
less tolerant views of female sexuality pervading Qing law. Although Qing
laws generally followed Ming precedents, Ng finds that Qing rape laws made
it much more difficult for victims to prove rape charges. Anything short of
resistance to the death was seen as compromising, and unless there were
witnesses, or evidence of resistance such as bruises, lacerations or torn
clothing, a woman could not hope to prove her case. Ng speculates that the
Qing imperial court perhaps hoped to make rape charges difficult to prove
against Manchu troops, and that the court also hoped to appeal to Chinese
conservatives by championing the cult of chastity themselves.[13] In addition
Ng believes Qing rape laws reflected a fear of female sexuality and an
assumption that promiscuous women would likely bring false charges
against innocent men unless legally discouraged from doing so. While Ng
seems to criticize Qing law from a contemporary Western feminist
perspective (by which standards eighteenth-century Western law was also
woefully lacking), her argument that Qing law compares unfavorably with
Ming law is still significant and worth pursuing.

Women in Literary Discourse

In a conference paper entitled ‘Sexuality and madness in traditional Chinese
tales’, Vivien Ng analyzes popular tales of women possessed by spirits. Here
she finds a strong fear of women, and of female sexuality as malevolent and
a major cause of insanity.[14] Another study that draws on popular
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literature and highlights male anxiety regarding gender boundaries and

hierarchies is Yenna Wu’s ‘The inversion of marital hierarchy: shrewish
wives and henpecked husbands in seventeenth-century Chinese literature’.
Wu argues that shrewish wife tales, long known in China, reached the peak
of their popularity in the seventeenth century. She analyzes many different
types of such tales and concludes that they reflect “a male fear of woman’s
competition for supremacy, anxiety that she may subvert the patriarchal
order, and a certain amount of hostility toward her. Men needed women for
procreation, support and comfort, yet dreaded their potential power to
dominate” (p. 368).
Keith McMahon’s work on late Ming vernacular fiction emphasizes the
sympathy these works exhibit for women, and the critique they offer of
patriarchal society. McMahon suggests that late Ming erotic fiction presented
a far more sympathetic view of women that did such ‘mainstream’ fiction as
Water Margin (Shuihuzhuan, a popular adventure novel noted for its
misogynist tendencies). In some of this erotic fiction (which thrived from the
mid-sixteenth century into the middle or late seventeenth century), women
are freed from their traditional constraints to express their own sexuality,

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choose their own partners, express grievances against their male masters
(including grievances against their sexual inadequacy), and in all these ways
to subvert the idea of male centrality.
In ‘Eroticism in late Ming, early Qing fiction’ and ‘A case for Confucian
sexuality: the eighteenth-century novel Yesou Puyan’ McMahon argues that
by the eighteenth century erotic themes were sublimated or idealized in
such works as Yesou Puyan and the famous Dream of the Red Chamber,
and in the popular scholar-beauty (caizi jiaren) romances. In effect, the
erotic is tamed, brought back under control, and male centrality is
reaffirmed. “In the historical perspective, it is as if the sixteenth-century
Ximen Qing [the libertine protagonist in the erotic classic Jin Ping Mei] has
been reformed and re-established in his role as polygamist. Nothing could be
in greater support of the traditional ideal of male centrality” (‘Eroticism’, p.
262). McMahon also notes the shift from women as sensual partners in late
Ming fiction to wives as intellectual and spiritual companions of husbands in
Qing fiction. He sees Qing government censorship, and early Qing reactions
against late Ming ‘decadence’, as partly responsible for this literary shift,
though it seems to me that an additional reason for the change might be the
actual spread of companionate marriages in the élite which in some ways
transferred the love ideals of literati-courtesans of the past to married (and
mutually talented) couples. In any case, McMahon’s studies raise important
questions about the impact of the Ming collapse and Qing conquest on the
changing conceptions of gender relations and sexuality in popular literature.
Tonglin Lu’s Rose and Lotus: narrative of desire in France and China
is one of the first comparative literary studies that deals equally with
Chinese and Western traditions. Specifically, Lu compares the negative or
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destructive attitudes toward sexuality in the sixteenth-century Jin Ping Mei

(The Golden Lotus) and the eighteenth-century Les Liaisons dangereuses;
and she discusses “the sublimation of sexual desire in the form of idealized
love” (p. 2) in the two eighteenth-century novels, Dream of the Red
Chamber, and Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise. Lu contrasts the unreflective
hedonism of Ximen Qing, and the close connection of sex with money in Jin
Ping Mei with the more psychological approach of Les Liaisons
dangereuses where sex is seen primarily as a means of gaining power over
others. In contrasting Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise with Dream
of the Red Chamber, Lu argues that Rousseau’s lovers could draw on a rich
“language of love” (especially from Christian mysticism) whereby they were
able to create through words alone an ideal love superior to any actual
experience. In Dream of the Red Chamber, by contrast, the young would-be
lovers, Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu, have no adequate language of love with
which to express their longings. Because there is no clear linguistic
distinction in Chinese between love and lust, the two young people can only
suffer misunderstandings in attempting expressions of love. Despite a
tendency to apply Western theoretical statements uncritically to Chinese

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traditions, and to overstate the comparability of these very different works,
Lu has written a stimulating and imaginative study.
Ann Waltner and Louise Edwards have recently applied the methods of
feminist literary criticism to Dream of the Red Chamber, writing,
respectively, ‘On not becoming a heroine: Lin Dai-yu and Cui Ying-ying’, and
‘Women in Honglou meng: prescriptions of purity in the femininity of Qing
dynasty China’. Waltner discusses the importance of the famous romantic
play Romance of the Western Chamber (Xixiang ji) and the conventions of
romantic tales in Dream of the Red Chamber and especially in the thinking
of the tragic heroine Lin Daiyu. Although profoundly drawn to the romantic
message of Western Chamber, Daiyu knows that in real life, romance very
likely leads not to happiness but to scandal and disgrace.
Louise Edwards rejects any simple reading of Dream of the Red

Chamber as a feminist or antipatriarchal novel. Even the many suffering

heroines of the Jia family, she notes, could be seen simply as a “mirror for
the chronicling of a male experience of life ...” (p. 409). While most male
characters in the novel are clearly inferior to the women, it is significant in
Edwards’s view that some men (such as two immortals, Zhen Shiyin and Liu
Xianglin) can mediate and cross over between the mythic and mimetic
realms, whereas women seem able to cross this boundary, if at all, only
through death (and most often through suicidal death). Whereas the author
Cao Xueqin praises young girls for their purity, he generally portrays
married women as polluted, jealous power-seekers, which, Edwards suggests,
“reveals many common assumptions about women in Qing China” (p. 420).
Nevertheless, Edwards concludes that in portraying a mythical realm free of
patriarchal dominance Cao’s novel “undermines comfortable assumptions
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about sexual ideologies” (p. 426), and she urges more feminist studies of
Dream of the Red Chamber in the future.
In ‘Xiaoqing’s literary legacy and the place of the woman writer in late
Imperial China’, Ellen Widmer surveys many popular versions (in prose,
poetic and dramatic forms) of a story about Xiaoqing, a lonely concubine
who wrote beautiful poetry in the early seventeenth century, but died very
young. While Xiaoqing is persecuted by a jealous first wife, she also suffers
because of her own talent (which roused the older woman’s jealousy), and
Xiaoqing’s death is hastened by her own strong emotional response to the
tragic love drama ‘The peony pavilion’. Widmer guides the reader through
the many versions of this story and commentaries on it by both men and
women. She sees male authors inspired to rewrite the Xiaoqing story as a
metaphor for their own alienation, as a metaphor for their Ming loyalism, as
a way to achieve fame for themselves by capitalizing on Xiaoqing’s fame, or
as an expression of their own ambivalence toward female talent. Tracing the
evolution of responses to the Xiaoqing story by men and by women into the
early nineteenth century, Widmer shows how the expanding cultural
horizons of women writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

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helped some of them to respond increasingly positively to the Xiaoqing

story, focusing more on her talent than her tragedy. Xiaoqing may or may
not have been an historical figure, but either way Widmer shows the
Xiaoqing stories and commentaries to have been important and illuminating
cultural phenomena.
In ‘A Confucian view of women in the Ch’ing period: literati laments
for women in the Ch’ing Shih tuo’, I survey poetry on women from a
nineteenth-century anthology of Qing-dynasty poetry that was compiled for
its social significance as a collection of voices from the people. This
anthology was an orthodox Confucian enterprise, designed to sensitize
officials to the sufferings and concerns of the common people. While
Confucian poets in the anthology (mostly male poets) praise widows who
commit suicide out of loyalty to their husbands, they do not expect such
behavior from women, and they attack venal families who persecute widows,
neglect their welfare, or threaten to sell or remarry them against their wills.
None of the poets cited here condemn footbinding or concubinage, but they
write bitter attacks against female infanticide, the sale of daughters as
concubines, maids or prostitutes, the arrangement of a daughter’s marriage
for the purpose of a family’s social or economic gain, and the mistreatment
of brides, concubines or maids by jealous and/or cruel mistresses and
mothers-in-law. In the Confucian view, the mistreatment of women in society
stemmed not from a misogynist Confucianism, but from the serious erosion
of Confucian ideals in the competitive society and rapidly growing economy
of the late imperial period. The anthology demonstrates the varieties of
Confucianisms that could coexist in the Qing period, and calls into question
any simple formula that attributes all the suffering of women in late imperial
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China to the ideals and practices of Confucianism.

Women’s Cultural Opportunities, Literacy, and Publication

‘The education of daughters in the mid-Ch’ing period’, by Susan Mann, is a

wide-ranging study of the socialization of daughters in the Qing period.
Mann defines education in its broadest sense including not just formal study
but also oral instruction, rituals, role-modeling, the celebration of festivals
and holidays, and the manipulation of signs and symbols that help to define
acceptable gender roles and identities. She begins by noting the profound
ambivalence toward female literacy as seen in the popular story of Zhu
Yingtai, a tragic heroine who commits suicide after falling in love with her
classmate while disguised as a boy and enrolled in a Hangzhou academy.
While celebrating love, this story dramatizes the potential tragic
consequences of allowing a girl outside the home for educational reasons.
Mann describes the many women’s activities associated with the Double
Seven Festival, the seventh night of the seventh lunar month when the two
constellations representing celestial lovers, the Herd Boy and Weaving Maid,

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meet for one precious night. In effect a women’s festival (featuring
embroidery competitions among other activities), Double Seven helped to
socialize literate and illiterate women alike by emphasizing the importance
of needlework for women, and by reinforcing the gendered division of labor.
Mann also analyzes mid-Qing dowry customs and notes the many signs and
symbols of the betrothal and wedding rituals that highlight a woman’s
responsibility to bear sons and to serve her parents-in-law.
In general Mann sees female education (in the formal sense) as far
more popular among the élite in the Qing than ever before in China. She
also describes, in tandem with growing female literacy, the proliferation of
women’s instruction books with their emphasis on segregation of the sexes,
and on the subordination of women. Summarizing orthodox instruction
books for women by such writers as Lan Dingyuan (1680-1733), Chen
Hongmou (1696-1771) and Zhang Xuecheng (1738-1801), Mann notes their
celebration of women‘s work and self-sacrifice, and the anxiety they reveal
concerning the dangers literacy could pose in threatening established
gender divisions. Nevertheless, she reminds us that literate women tended to
read far beyond the narrow recommendations of these instruction books,
and to include in their reading the classics and histories, and (more
heretically) fiction, drama, and especially poetry. Mann observes several
parallels between mid-Qing women and those of the European Renaissance.
In both cases ‘respectable’ women were confined to the home while
courtesans were seen as dangerous precisely because unconstrained by
enclosed boundaries of domestic life. Despite her emphasis on the
constraints faced by educated Chinese women, Mann concludes that
education was in a way empowering for women, giving them a means of
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self-expression and participation in the formation of élite culture.

An excellent illustration of the expanding cultural opportunities for
Chinese women in the late imperial era is the catalogue of a recent
exhibition of paintings by Chinese women, Views from Jade Terrace:

Chinese women artists, 1300-1911, co-authored by Marsha Weidner, Ellen

Johnston Laing, Irving Yucheng Lo, Christina Chu, and James Robinson. In
addition to beautiful color prints of the exhibition, the catalogue contains
insightful essays by Marsha Weidner, and Ellen Johnston Laing, on the
traditions, styles, and significance of women’s painting in China, and by
Irving Lo on several famous women poets. Weidner and Laing highlight the
close connections between painting and many other arts including poetry,
calligraphy, embroidery, music, seal carving, etc. Both authors see the
Ming-Qing period as one of growing opportunities for women, whether as
courtesans or as gentry daughters, wives and mothers. Weidner suggests
that the tradition of women painting grew out of the domestic art of
embroidery. The male literati amateur ideal also helped to make painting
and poetry acceptable skills for respectable women, for these were not
professional skills; they could be practised and perfected in the privacy of

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the women’s quarters, and therefore they did not threaten domestic
arrangements. Nevertheless, some women (including courtesans, merchant
and even gentry wives) developed artistic skills directly for the marketplace;
Ellen Johnston Laing notes that there was a strong market for artistic works
by women in the late imperial period. In addition, painting, calligraphy and
poetry clearly came to be seen as desirable skills for women in many gentry
families in the Ming and Qing. Weidner notes that the art of painting,
whether for the production of gifts or items for sale in the market, or simply
to be enjoyed as a desirable amateur skill for the cultivated bride, “served as
a form of social currency, a medium of exchange used to secure tangible and
intangible rewards in literati circles” (p. 28). The paintings and essays of this
catalogue help to illustrate the ways that courtesan skills of earlier times
became domesticated in many gentry homes by the Qing period.
Some of these same themes are further explored in an anthology
edited by Marsha Weidner, Flowering in the Shadows: women in the

history of Chinese and Japanese In her introduction, Weidner

painting.

notes the relative lack of attention to women in Chinese and Japanese art
history, and argues for the greater inclusion of women hereafter. Three of
the ten essays in her collection deal with Ming and Qing women artists.
Ellen Johnston Laing, in ‘Women painters in traditional China’, surveys the
biographies of women painters in a recent biographical dictionary of Chinese
artists. She discovers 1046 women out of a total of 31,200 biographies, or
approximately 3.35% women. Most of these women lived in the late imperial
period when courtesans and gentry wives developed something of a tradition
in women’s painting. While these women painted a fairly narrow range of
subjects (flowers, landscapes, butterflies and portraits in descending order of
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frequency), some women artists were compared favorably with famous male
painters, some of them had male students, and some, even among the
gentry, relied on painting as a means of economic support.
The other two essays in Weidner’s volume deal respectively with a
famous gentry wife and mother, and a famous courtesan. Weidner’s own
essay, ‘The conventional success of Ch’en Shu’, shows how Chen Shu
(1660-1736) attained fame by painting in relatively conventional and
conservative styles, by exemplifying the Confucian virtues of wifely loyalty
and motherly devotion, and by raising a son who became one of the most
prominent officials in the empire. Chen Shu worked in many genres and
“stayed well within the bounds of established traditions” (p. 145), but her
high reputation as an artist was secured in large part by her moral
reputation as a tower of strength in her family, and by the high prominence
of her eldest son who presented many of her works as gifts to the Qianlong
Emperor (who in turn inscribed them with his own laudatory comments and
preserved them for posterity). In ‘The painting of Liu Yin’ James Cahill
surveys a few paintings attributed to the famous Ming loyalist courtesan
more widely known as Liu Shi or Liu Rushi (1618-64). He briefly surveys

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Liu’s turbulent life, examines two paintings he regards as unreliably
attributed to her, several that are doubtful, and one painting he judges as
both authentic and highly original. Despite the ambiguity of his sources,
Cahill concludes that Liu Shi was indeed a talented painter, and he also
illustrates her fame and influence as an artist, and her close association with
the famous poet and critic Qian Qianyi.
In a recent book and two articles, Kang-i Sun Chang illustrates the
importance of female literacy, romantic love and the courtesan world of the
late Ming in shaping the literary culture of late imperial China. In The Late
Ming Poet Ch’en Tzu-lung: crises of love and loyalism, Chang emphasizes
the importance of the concept of qing (feeling, passion, or love), and the
close but often-overlooked relationship between love and Ming loyalism in
the poetry and cultural life of the late Ming and early Qing. The focus of this
work is the relationship between Chen Zilong (1608-1647) and the famous
courtesan poet Lin Shi.[15] By the late Ming, Chang argues, it was assumed
that a talented literatus could find intellectual and emotional fulfillment only
if united with a gifted woman. In the urban entertainment culture of the
southern lower Yangtze valley, Chang finds suggestions of a new sense of
male–female equality based on compatibility of talent and interests, and on
mutual respect. (Chang also notes in passing that China had long had a
stronger tradition of women’s poetry than did the West.)
A number of famous courtesans were associated with the cause of
Ming loyalism, and after the Qing conquest, many loyalist poets came to see
in the courtesan a metaphor for their own precarious and helpless plight.
Kang-i Sun Chang argues that much of the vocabulary as well as the
rhetorical methods and emotional richness of loyalist poetry were first
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developed in the poetry of love. The importance of courtesans and of

romantic love in late-Ming-early-Qing culture has been obscured by the
conservative reaction of the Chinese literati to the Qing conquest. By the
mid-Qing, as a result, romantic love was no longer seen as essential to the
hero, and a more orthodox and puritanical Confucianism held sway.
Courtesans came to be increasingly excluded from the élite world of letters
and publication, and as a result, the importance of the close relationship
between courtesans and late Ming literati (as exemplified by Chen Zilong
and Liu Shi) came to be overlooked.
In ‘Liu Shih and Hsu Ts’an: feminine or feminist?’ Chang makes an
interesting contrast between the song lyrics (ci) of the courtesan Liu Shi and
the famous gentry woman master of the song lyric, Xu Can (c.1610-after
1677). Whereas Liu Shi was famous for her use of the ‘feminine’ wanyue
style of song lyric, Xu Can, tended to adopt the ‘masculine’ haofang style in
her poems of complaint against her husband. (She was angry both because
he took a concubine while living away from home, and because he violated
his obligations of loyalty to the Ming dynasty in order to serve the newly
established Manchu dynasty.) Chang notes the irony that Xu Can, the proper

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gentry wife, was in some ways more feminist than Liu Shi, the
unconventional courtesan, because Xu was less feminine, and more bold, in
crossing gender and generic boundaries in her poetry. Whereas Liu Shi
focused her song lyrics on romantic love, Xu Can “worked toward a balance
between masculinity and femininity, so that the impression created is
femaleness made more heroic, femaleness realized by being freer and more
concrete” (p. 183). Finally, Chang notes that courtesan writings were often
suppressed or denigrated in the eighteenth century, even while the writing
styles of courtesans were being appropriated by respectable gentry women
such as Xu Can.
In ‘The idea of the mask in Wu Wei-yeh’, Chang illustrates some of
these same ideas through the study of Wu Weiye (1609-72), one of the most
famous poets of the seventeenth century. Noting the close connection
between Wu’s concepts of love and loyalty, Chang explores his use of a
woman’s voice in ostensible love poetry to express (even while veiling) the
ideals of Ming loyalism.[16] As in her book, Chang highlights the impact of
prominent multi-talented courtesans on late Ming literary culture, and she
notes that the hardships they suffered in the Qing conquest paralleled those
of Ming loyalist scholar-officials. One hopes that Chang’s important studies
might prompt similar efforts outside the realm of literary culture to assess
the impact of the Ming collapse and Qing conquest on gender relations and
the lives of women in the Qing period.
An important example of a gentry wife famous for the kind of love
poetry formerly associated with courtesans is Huang Xiumei (Huang E,
1498-1569), the wife of the Ming literatus Yang Shen. A brief but sensitive
study of Huang E’s life and poetry is ‘The love poems of Yang Shen and
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Huang Hsiu-mei’, by Ch’en Hsiao-lan & F. W. Mote. Ch’en & Mote recount
briefly the story of this famous couple’s marriage and nearly lifelong
separation as Yang was exiled to Yunnan for some thirty-five years. Huang E
heroically maintained the family household and served her in-laws faithfully
during her husband’s long exile, but she became especially famous in the
late Ming for the audacious, witty and often erotic poetry attributed to her
and published along with her husband’s collected poems. Ch’en & Mote
agree with the contemporary mainland Chinese scholar, Wang Wencai, that
most of the poetry attributed to Huang E was probably written by Yang
Shen, or by others anxious to cash in on her fame and sell titillating works
in her name. But more importantly, after expertly analyzing several poems
by Huang E that they believe to be genuine. Ch’en & Mote sensibly
conclude by emphasizing the felt need in late Ming society for the kind of
poetry attributed to this couple. By the mid-sixteenth century some members
of élite society wanted to believe that such a woman as Huang E could exist,
could write audacious love poetry to her husband, and could still be a
respected member of élite society.

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Two essays, by Grace S. Fong and Maureen Robertson respectively,
make effective use of Western literary theory to explore the development of
a woman’s voice in poetic genres first developed by men. Robertson, in
‘Voicing the feminine: constructions of the gendered subject in lyric poetry
by women of Medieval and late Imperial China’, outlines the development of
lyric (shi) poetry by women, and with a judicious selection of fine poems and
sensitive translations, she illustrates the ways women injected their own
concerns into the genre. She argues that women “reinscribed literati codes
and topics” in constructing their own forms of subjectivity, and thereby
achieved “a genuine ‘tradition’ of women’s writings in late imperial China”
(p. 72). In ‘Engendering the lyric: her image and voice in song’, Grace Fong
traces the development of ci poetry or song lyrics by women. She argues
that women writing ci poetry faced a particularly difficult challenge in
developing their own voice precisely because men had defined the ci genre
which they often wrote “in a woman’s voice”, thus creating a male definition
of the “feminine” characterized by the male gaze and male projections of
desire. Both these essays break new ground in illuminating the importance,
complexity and ambiguity of the relationship between gender and poetic
genres in the Chinese tradition.
In ‘Love, literacy and laments: themes of women writers in late
Imperial China’, I examine the writings of several women (from the sixteenth
to the early nineteenth century) in shi and ci poetry, and in tanci (long
dramas in prose and verse), exploring in these different genres women’s
attitudes towards romantic love, literacy, and women’s prescribed social
roles. I argue that the late Ming ideal of romantic love between literatus and
courtesan tended in the Qing to be domesticated in the form of
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companionate marriages in the gentry class. These companionate marriages

were not compatible with age and gender hierarchies in the patriarchal
family, and the potential disruption of companionate marriages probably
helped provoke the kinds of male anxiety discussed by Charlotte Furth and
Yenna Wu. As a popular fictional genre among women writers, readers and
listening audiences, the tanci dramas could be effective vehicles for the
expression of social criticism. In the more orthodox and more respected
genres of regulated verse and song lyrics, one finds less outspoken social
criticism than in the dramas, but in the heretofore male-dominated genres of
poetry, women also began to develop their own themes and forms of
self-revelation.
Marina Sung’s doctoral dissertation, ‘The narrative art of
Tsai-sheng-yuan – a feminist vision in traditional Confucian society’ is a
literary study of the most famous tanci (drama in prose and verse) in the
Chinese tradition. Destiny of Rebirth (Zaishengyuan) was begun in the
eighteenth century by Chen Duansheng (1751-96) and finished in the early
nineteenth century by Liang Desheng (1771-1847). Citing several earlier
scholars of this work, Sung sees in Destiny of Rebirth a “feminist vision

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promoting the emancipation of women” (p. 9), albeit within the context of
Confucian institutions and values. The most striking character in this long
work is the heroine Meng Lijun who, in male disguise, succeeds
spectacularly in the examinations, and becomes prime minister, but then
refuses to admit that she is a woman betrothed to a man above whom she
has now risen. Sung’s main purpose is to examine the narrative strategies
and techniques employed in this famous drama, and to show that the work
is a literary masterpiece on a par with China’s greatest novels and plays. Her
work is important in illustrating the richness of the tanci form as a genre
often written by and for women. She amply illustrates Chen Duansheng’s
skill in manipulating multiple voices and perspectives in telling a highly
fanciful story that is also a stinging critique of the treatment of women in
Confucian society. Clearly literacy inspired some women to think far beyond
the confines of the ‘women’s sphere’.
In ‘The epistolary world of female talent in seventeenth-century China’,
Ellen Widmer examines three collections of letters which reveal evidence of
important supportive networks of literate gentry women in the Hangzhou
area in the seventeenth century. Published in the 1660s by Wang Qi, a
Huizhou merchant living in Hangzhou, this series, entitled Modern Letters
(Chidu xinyu), was intended to entertain and to provide models of good
writing. Each collection contains a guige or women’s section, but only the
third includes many letters written by women themselves. In these letters
Widmer finds a group of fairly prominent gentry women who kept in regular
contact by letter, who often exchanged poetry, painting and/or calligraphy,
who sometimes established formal poetry societies across considerable
distances, and who offered each other mutual support in their efforts to
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improve their writing and artistic skills. Widmer contrasts the enthusiasm of
these women with considerable ambivalence on the part of male editors and
authors over female literacy. In light of such evident male anxiety over
female literacy, she makes the intriguing observation that the fate of Lin
Daiyu, the tragic heroine of Dream of the Red Chamber may reflect not so
much an actual experience of its author, Cao Xueqin, as popular
assumptions regarding the dangers of literacy and literary exposure for
women. Widmer notes the popularity of stories reflecting the belief that a
woman both beautiful and talented was doomed to an unhappy fate, and
reports on several male authors and editors who declined to have their
daughters taught to read and write. In conclusion, she contrasts these
networks of gentry women with the more well known cases of women
disciples of male mentors (e.g. the poets Yuan Mei and Chen Wenshu), and
the more cloistered type of family environment as portrayed in Dream of the
Red Chamber. She suggests that supportive networks of gentry women
certainly continued into the eighteenth century, and helped pose an
“implicit challenge to traditional thinking about gender and creativity” (p.
34).

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The most extensive English-language study of women in the late Ming
and early Qing is Dorothy Yin-yee Ko’s doctoral dissertation, ‘Toward a
social history of women in seventeenth-century China’.[17] Beginning her
study with a discussion of the Manchu conquest of Jiangnan, China’s
southern lower Yangtze valley, Ko tells a number of chilling stories about
women’s resistance to the conquest through fighting and/or suicide, and
about the capture of women as war booty and the sale of captive women as
slaves, prostitutes and concubines. (She notes also that sale of women did
not end with the conquest, for in the increasingly competitive economy of
highly developed Jiangnan, some families actually raised daughters for sale
as concubines and prostitutes.) Ko concludes that the reactions of women in
the Qing conquest reveal the effectiveness of female education in
indoctrinating gentry women with the self-sacrificial values of the cult of
chastity and the patriarchal Confucian family system.
Ko describes in illuminating detail the structure, form and content of
female education for upper-class or gentry women in seventeenth-century
Jiangnan, and she argues that professional female teachers (guishushi or
teachers of the inner chambers) became more and more common in the
early eighteenth century. These women most often taught poetry, despite
the warnings of many orthodox commentators such as Lü Kun who
cautioned against the dangers of teaching poetry to women. Ko also focuses
on education and networks of women in the Jiangnan entertainment world
of courtesans, prostitutes, actresses, and women trained for sale as
concubines. She highlights the blurring of class lines in late Ming times with
several examples of famous courtesans who enjoyed relative freedom and a
high degree of fame and respectability.
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Ko’s final chapter is a study of Ming-Qing popular literature and the

ambivalence toward female literacy reflected there. Discussing the extreme
popularity among women of the romantic drama The Peony Pavilion
(Mudanting) by Tang Xianzu (1550-1617), she sees romantic love as
increasingly important in the culture of literate women in the seventeenth
century. She also notes the increasing popularity of stories of jealous wives
and of beautiful women doomed by their talent (and/or beauty) to
unhappiness and often to early death. She argues persuasively in conclusion
that such stories reflected growing élite concerns over commercialization,
rapid social change, and a late-Ming-early-Qing social reality in which women
were becoming “increasingly educated, independent, and assertive” (p. 152).
Ko has written an incisive study based on an impressive array of primary
documentation in Chinese coupled with wide reading in the secondary
scholarship available in English, Chinese and Japanese.
In her essay, ‘Pursuing talent and virtue: education and women’s
culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China’, Ko argues that
advanced education for women was readily available among the élite families
of the prosperous southern lower Yangtze valley by the Qing period. Despite

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the confinement of women to the private ‘separate sphere’ of the household,

and despite the ambivalence of many men toward female talent, Ko shows

the importance of mother–daughter ties and women’s networks in fostering

advanced female education and the publication of poetry by women in some

influential quarters of the cultural élite. She demonstrates that among some

gentry families, female talent and virtue were assumed to be fully

compatible. In light of such evidence, didactic works which cautioned

against poetic training for women on the theory that female virtue and

talent were incompatible cannot necessarily be taken as representative of

social practice.

Marie Florine Bruneau, a historian of seventeenth-century France, has

written an interesting comparative commentary on the articles by Ko, Mann,

Robertson and Widmer on Chinese women’s culture in Late Imperial

China. In ‘Learned and literary women in late Imperial China and early

modern France’, Bruneau implies that Chinese historians might profitably

pay more attention to power relations in the future by revising and

appropriating the theories of power developed by Michel Foucault and

Michel de Certeau. In comparing gender relations in Europe and China,

Bruneau sees more similarities than contrasts. In both, female education

increasingly occurred, provoking a good deal of male ambivalence and

hostility. The institutions of patriarchy were equally powerful in both

societies, in Bruneau’s view, but European patriarchy seemed more subject

to internal contradictions, thus offering European women more room for

manoeuvre. For example, Chinese women were generally more confined

spatially than their European counterparts, and partly because of the

absence of powerful religious institutions in China, Chinese women had

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fewer options than did European women outside of marriage. On the other

hand, perhaps because Chinese women were more confined, they appear to

have met with less overt hostility from men when they began to write and

publish.

Bruneau applauds the recent Western emphasis on Chinese women’s

agency, and she recognizes the delicate position of Western students of

China trying to avoid Orientalist condescension toward Chinese women and

Chinese society; but in her conclusion, she reminds Chinese historians that

women in China were also victims who were in some ways trapped in

vertical power relations. Bruneau’s comments are stimulating and suggestive

for Chinese historians faced with the challenge of writing feminist analyses

of gender relations in China while avoiding condescending assumptions of

Western superiority.

In a recent conference paper, “The ‘constant world’ of Wang

Chao-yuan: women, education, and orthodoxy in 18th century China – a

preliminary investigation”, Harriet T. Zurndorfer examines the growing

literacy of women in the eighteenth century, the apparent spread of

companionate marriages in the gentry class, and the content and

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implications of prescriptive writings for women. Zurndorfer points out the
complexities involved in interpreting prescriptive and admonitory works
since such writings may reflect common social practices or may only reflect
resistance to or criticism of common practices. She also cautions against
assuming that all the restrictions on women in late imperial times were the
direct result of Confucian or Neo-Confucian doctrines.
Concluding with a brief biographical sketch of an accomplished female
scholar, Wang Zhaoyuan (1763-1851), Zurndorfer argues that Wang’s
companionate marriage with the naturalist and scholar Hao Yixing
(1757-1825) – the two shared many intellectual interests and co-authored
several works – was in no way incompatible with Neo-Confucian orthodoxy.
Although she studied alongside her husband when he was preparing for the
metropolitan examination, and seems to have been an equal participant with
him in a number of joint projects, Wang strongly supported orthodox views
of gender divisions and hierarchies: she wrote an approving commentary on
Liu Xiang’s Lienü zhuan, and strongly supported Neo-Confucian doctrines
of lijiao (ethical propriety) and orthodox views of proper gender hierarchies.
Zurndorfer (who is working on a full length biography of Wang Zhaoyuan)
speculates that Wang and Hao, who lived in modest circumstances in coastal
Shandong, may have championed orthodoxy in part to win acceptance in
more élite circles. In any case their example illustrates that there is no
necessary contradiction between companionate marriages and Confucian
orthodoxy.

Conclusion
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As this survey demonstrates, Western scholars are increasingly exploring

gender-related issues in late imperial China.[18] In the future, a great deal of
work will be forthcoming on individual female authors in the Ming and Qing
periods. Many issues remain relatively unexplored and/or inadequately
understood. Among these I would include beliefs and practices concerning
the body, sexuality and reproduction; quantitative measures of temporal,
spacial and class distribution in women’s education and publication; the
incidence and social significance of widow chastity and suicide and of
footbinding; the impact of the Qing conquest on Chinese women and gender
relations; the degree and nature of the commodification of women in the
late imperial period; the significance of changing attitudes toward gender in
the literary culture of the Ming and Qing; the state of gender relations as
seen in Ming-Qing legal cases; the relationship between élite and commoner
attitudes, beliefs and practices regarding women and gender issues; and the
impact of gender-related issues and tensions on the larger culture. Each
historian could no doubt generate his or her own list of crucial topics still to
be done.

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Another important task emerging from this work will be to integrate

developments in women’s studies into our general picture of the social,
political, economic and cultural history of China. The roles of women and
gender issues in late imperial Chinese culture and society are only now
beginning to be understood. Despite the many new studies outlined above, it
seems safe to say that the China field has not been as deeply affected by the
growth of women’s studies as has the history of Western culture and society.
For example, with the exception of Jonathan Spence’s The Search for

Modern China, there have been few attempts to date to integrate studies of
women and gender issues into the general history of China. Moreover, many
historians continue to engage in Chinese political and intellectual history as
if issues of gender and women’s roles have little importance. A major task of
the next generation of scholars will be to integrate the findings of women’s
studies into the general history of China.
In addition, Western scholars of Chinese women’s history would surely
benefit from several dialogues with specialists in other fields. Despite
liberalization in China in the 1980s, there has still been relatively little
contact between Chinese and Western scholars. We in the West have long
depended (from a distance) upon the linguistic expertise and
insider-perspective of Chinese scholars, and their contributions are becoming
increasingly valuable to us as they are allowed more freedom to move
beyond the Marxist categories of economic determinism and class struggle.
Chinese scholars may likewise benefit from increased exposure to the
Western outsider-perspective and to Western social, literary, and feminist
theory. The long overdue dialogue between Chinese and Western specialists
is only now beginning.[19]
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Specialists on late imperial China also have much to learn from work
in other fields. Because of the demands of learning classical Chinese, few of
us in the China field have the time and energy to become well versed in
Western history or in feminist theory. Greater attention to Western theory,
and conversations with Westerm specialists in women’s studies, could very
much enrich the study of women in China. Conversely, since the experience
of women in late imperial China is so abundantly documented, and so
distinct from the Western experience, it seems reasonable to hope that
greater exposure to the China field might help enhance the development of
Western theory. Comparative studies of East and West could be the next
and most exciting frontier in women’s history.

Notes
[1] This review originated as a Chinese-language article published in the Taiwan
journal Xinshi xue (New History), 2(4) (Feb. 1992), pp. 77-116. I am indebted to
Angela Leung for suggesting the idea of such a review, for offering valuable

criticisms of earlier drafts, and for providing an excellent Chinese translation of

the original. In the process of revising and updating the essay for a Western

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audience, I benefited greatly from the excellent criticisms and suggestions of
Philippa Levine and two anonymous reviewers for Women’s History Review. I
am grateful to all of the above.
[2] Although Soulliere briefly cites Joanna Handlin’s influential study of Lü Kun,
she does not clarify whether or where her analysis differs from that of Handlin.
See Joanna F. Handlin (1975) Lü K’un’s new audience: the influence of
women’s literacy on sixteenth century thought, in Margery Wolf & Roxane
Witke (Eds)Women in Chinese Society, pp. 13-38 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press).
[3] Jack Goody (1973) Bridewealth and dowry in Africa and Eurasia, in Jack Goody
& S. J. Tambiah (Eds)Bridewealth and Dowry (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press); Jack Goody (1976) Inheritance, property and women: some
comparative perspectives, in Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk & E. P. Thompson (Eds)
Family and Inheritance: rural society in Western Europe, 1200-1800

(Cambridge : Cambridge University Press); Jack Goody (1976) Production and

Reproduction: a comparative study of the domestic domain (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press); Jack Goody (1983) The Development of the

Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

[4] The essays on pre-Qing periods include: Melvin Thatcher, ‘Marriages of the
ruling élite in the spring and autumn period’; Patricia Ebrey, ‘Shifts in marriage
finance from the sixth to the thirteenth century’; Jennifer Holmgren, ‘Imperial
marriage in the native Chinese and non-Han state, Han to Ming’; and John W.
Chaffee, ‘The marriage of Sung Imperial clanswomen’.
[5] Lest the non-China specialist be confused by the two different Romanization
systems in use today, I should point out that I am using the pinyin system
whereas some of the works under review here use the older Wade-Giles system.
Thus the Song and Qing dynasties in are written as Sung and Ch’ing
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pinyin

respectively in Wade-Giles.
[6] The other two concern post-1949 issues: William Lavely, ‘Marriage and mobility
under rural collectivism’; and Jonathan K. Ocko, ‘Women, property, and law in
the People’s Republic of China’.
[7] Two recent books that do not deal specifically with gender issues, but that
illuminate important aspects of marriage and family life in late imperial China
are Ann Waltner (1990) Getting an Heir: adoption and the construction of

kinship in late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press); and

Patricia Buckley Ebrey (1991) Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial

China: a social history of writing about rites (Princeton: Princeton University

Press).
[8] Craig Clunas (1991) discusses women as commodities very briefly but
insightfully in his imaginative book on Ming connoisseurship, Superfluous

Things: material culture and social status in early modern China, p. 118
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Clunas illuminates the
growing trade in luxury items (including concubines) in Ming times, and the
importance of such commodities as markers of social status.

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[9] Two articles by Jennifer Holmgren (‘The economic foundations of virtue:

widow-remarriage in early and modern China’, and ‘Observations on marriage
and inheritance practices in early Mongol and Yuan society, with particular
reference to the Levirate’) provide illuminating background on the Ming-Qing
period. Holmgren sees widow chastity and suicide not as a function of
Neo-Confucian values but as a response to changes in inheritance practices and
economic developments in the late imperial era. Her analysis (which lies beyond
the scope of this review) is very useful in highlighting the economic factors in
the status and condition of widows, but it leaves unexplored the possible
interrelationships between those economic factors and other variables such as
changes in social structure, state-sponsored orthodoxy, and wider intellectual
trends.
[10] See Margery Wolf (1972) Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan, esp.
pp. 32-41 (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
[11] In a 13-page appendix, T’ien discusses the practice of gegu, cutting off and
feeding one’s own flesh to an ailing parent in the belief that such profoundly
filial behavior could have miraculous curative effects. He notes that this custom,
which followed a curve similar to that of widow suicide, was recorded and
praised, but not practiced, by the élite.
[12] Patricia Buckley Ebrey & James L. Watson, Kinship Organization in Late
Imperial China, p. 282. Watson cautions that Dennerline may have been misled
by the hagiographic nature of his written and oral sources which might easily
romanticize the role of widows, but nevertheless, the charitable estates
themselves would suggest that some members of the élite went to great lengths
to provide for the lifelong security of widows.
[13] An earlier study that also emphasizes the sexual puritanism of Qing law,
especially in regard to female chastity, is M. J. Meijer (1981) ‘The price of a
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P’ai-lou, T’oung Pao, 67(3-5), pp. 288-304.

[14] Ng (1990) also discusses the relationship between female sexuality and madness
in her book, Madness in Late Imperial China, pp. 56-59 (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press).
[15] Yes, this is the same Liu Shi discussed by James Cahill. After an intense love
affair with Chen Zilong (an affair apparently ended by pressure from Chen’s
wife), Liu became the concubine of Qian Qianyi.
[16] Chang also analyzes Wu Weiye’s play, Spring in Moling (Moling chun), a love
story set in the tenth-century aftermath of the Tang collapse and the rise of the
Northern Song. In her persuasive interpretation, this love story (where the
happy marriage takes place only after death in Heaven) illustrates the theme that
in the face of the catastrophe of dynastic collapse the sensitive scholar-official
can only find fulfillment in marriage, or after death in Heaven, or perhaps as a
Daoist immortal.
[17] This work is currently being revised for publication under the title Teachers of
the Inner Chambers: women and culture in China, 1573-1722 (forthcoming,
Stanford University Press).

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[18] For example, Kang-i Sun Chang is currently at work on a book analyzing

Ming-Qing women poets, and in collaboration with many translators, she is

editing an extensive anthology of Chinese women poets from all periods (with

the majority naturally from late imperial times). In addition, many of the scholars
cited above are currently undertaking additional work on related topics.

[19] For example, the first international conference in America on Chinese women

that included more than a token Chinese representation was only held in

February 1992. The three-day conference, ‘Engendering China: women, culture,

and the state’, took place at Harvard University, Wellseley College and

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over a third of the 31 conference papers

dealt with twentieth-century China, several were devoted to Ming-Qing

developments. Although published too late to be included in this review, some of

the papers from this conference have now appeared in a volume, Engendering

China, published by Harvard University Press in 1994. In addition, in January

1992, an international conference on ‘Family process and political process in

modern Chinese history’ was held in Taipei, Taiwan, and co-sponsored by the
Department of History, University of California, Davis, and the Institute of

Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei. This conference included many

Chinese and Western scholars, several of whom presented papers on women’s

issues in the late imperial period. Finally, reflecting the rapid expansion of the

field, a four-day conference, ‘Women and literature in Ming-Qing China’, was

held at Yale University in June 1993, in which 27 papers were presented by

scholars from China, Taiwan, Japan, Canada, and the United States. Some of the

essays from this conference are to be published by Stanford University Press.

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